Exile Shrinks Lives, Hopes of Cambodians

Two weeks after Prince Norodom Ranariddh went from royalty to refugee in a bloody ouster, the bit of Cambodia still under his control can fit into a hotel room.

Cambodia’s deposed first prime minister has become the crown of a mobile kingdom in exile, a suitcase sovereign, hurtling from country to country pleading for support for a return to power.

So far, he has failed to persuade the United Nations, Washington and even his father, King Norodom Sihanouk, to fight for his restoration. On Saturday, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, who wrested power from the prince, rejected efforts to form a power-sharing caretaker government until elections next May.

That leaves little hope for Ranariddh, and the handful of his FUNCINPEC party members who did not die or defect in Hun Sen’s takeover, to return to power--or even to Cambodia.

Now the tiny camp of loyal royalists holds Cabinet meetings in coffee shops. Their families squabble over tiny shared apartments where they must live without their bodyguards and servants--and, most daunting, without any idea of what the future holds.

“I’m still a member of parliament,” said lawmaker Ahmad Yahya. “But I feel like a refugee.”

The prince’s former partner and now-rival, Hun Sen, has made sure there’s not much to come back to. Ranariddh is a traitor and a criminal, Hun Sen has declared, and must face trial if he returns.

For Cambodia, the expulsion has the echo of history. Like the prince, Ranariddh’s father was deposed, in 1970, while on a trip to France. He returned as nominal ruler from 1975 to 1979, then fled to Beijing until he was reinstalled in 1991 as the leader of a coalition government. Currently seeking medical treatment in Beijing, he presides from afar over the chaotic power struggle in his troubled country.

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On the whitewashed walls of Ranariddh’s home in the capital, Phnom Penh, is a warning: A large pockmark in the plaster, ringed with red splashes, marks the site where one of his bodyguards was shot during the fight for control of the city. Inside the walls, the house is ravaged; Hun Sen’s soldiers plundered the royal residence, and civilians soon followed.

“They took everything,” said a neighbor, a businessman who fled the country. “The TV, his shoes, even the iron and ironing board.”

For the businessman, and many others who rushed to the airport with just what they could carry, exile is familiar. He escaped Cambodia in 1979 after Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot’s reign of terror ended, lived in a refugee camp and then moved to the U.S., where he helped organize overseas opposition to Hun Sen. Now, with the sudden end to Ranariddh’s four years in power, he’s back in the “resistance.”

“How can we live in a system that is so ruthless, so barbaric?” he said in a Bangkok hotel lounge. He predicted that the cycle of violence will continue. “Cambodian people will not give up easily.”

Royalist legislator Prak Chantha hasn’t given up, but she doesn’t know what to do. When her colleagues began to disappear during the fighting earlier this month, she fled to Thailand, leaving two of her five children behind because they didn’t have passports or enough money to get out.

“I’m worried because Hun Sen is a madman,” she said. “I thought I would be killed if I stayed.”

Her family’s new quarters are a single room in a shabby, $16-a-night hotel in central Bangkok; an entire floor is populated by 23 parliament members on the run and their families. Across the corridor, three small boys taunt each other with a dead cockroach and two others practice All-Star Wrestling body slams on the naked mattress.

Prak Chantha’s family brought one suitcase each. “I didn’t know what to bring,” she said, gesturing to a pink satin-and-lace camisole her youngest daughter was trying on that hinted at the pampered life they left behind. “How do you pack for a future you don’t know?”

At a desk, a fellow lawmaker dressed in silver silk pajamas scribbled notes to a human rights official in Phnom Penh, to add to a stack of other pleas: “Please help my wife get out.” “Please make sure my children are all right.” “Six more legislators are in danger. They have no money. Can you help them get to Thailand?”

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Yahya, a lawmaker known for his frank criticism of Hun Sen, heard he was on the “death list” of soldiers searching door to door for enemies of Hun Sen and raced to the airport with his family. His wife, Sedica, is due to have a baby “this week, maybe tomorrow,” he said. But he might miss it--he’s planning to go to Washington on Monday to lobby for support.

“If I stay in Cambodia, I would have to do whatever they asked me to do. I would have to say black is white. I don’t want to be the enemy,” he said, pacing the floor.

But Yahya insisted that he will return to Phnom Penh in time for the July 28 National Assembly meeting at which members will vote whether to accept FUNCINPEC member Ung Huot to replace Ranariddh as Hun Sen’s co-premier. There may not be enough members to form a quorum, and few dare to defy Hun Sen. “But who else will support the prince?” he asked.

While the exiled lawmakers met with visiting ministers from the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, Sedica Yahya talked about the cooks, the servants, the rooms full of fancy clothes and, most of all, the bodyguards she left behind.

In the last few months, political tensions were so thick between the prince and Hun Sen, she said, her two older sons took turns going to school with the bodyguard while the other stayed at home under her care so they wouldn’t be kidnapped.

“My husband is very outspoken, so it has never been easy for us,” she said.

She pondered where they will go next. “I will not take the children back. No way.”